The Man Who Got Us to ‘Like’ Everything is a mini profile of Soleio Cuervo, designer of Facebook’s now-iconic thumbs up “like” symbol. It’s a fairly straightforward piece, which emphasizes Mark Zuckerberg’s engagement with the design process. This passage in particular grabbed me:
“People don’t go to airports to hang out. They go from point A to point B,” he said. He tries to channel the feeling of being lost. “What was it like not to find that bathroom for 10 minutes?” he asked.
Checking your Facebook page in a hurry isn’t so different from needing a bathroom in an airport, he said. “If you have 12 minutes to use Facebook before work, how do you get maximum value out of it?”
I love this insight, and I think it’s totally smart to think about interaction design in terms of physical wayfinding systems. (For some really wonderful real world examples, check out the work of Paul Mijksenaar, who designed the system at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam.) Yet I’m also a bit confused by this assertion.
Perhaps if you work at Facebook then you’re not worried about figuring out how to change your account security settings or some of the deeper interactions that only some users will attempt to execute. But, to use his analogy, if I’d needed the bathroom whenever I’ve tried to figure out how to ensure my privacy settings were just as I want them, well, let’s just put it this way, it wouldn’t have ended well.
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